Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  I should like even to be cutting up the hash with the clerk and some register people at the other table, and you standing by, watching that I put enough flour, not too much pepper, and, above all, that I save the best piece of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper, the first of which personages would be jumping about the dish and carving knife, and the latter standing like a devouring flame on the kitchen floor. To complete the picture, Tabby blowing the fire, in order to boil the potatoes to a sort of vegetable glue! How divine are these recollections to me at this moment!

  But she intended to remain in Brussels, still clinging to the protestation that she must acquire more German, and feeding her soul with the sweet torture that racked her. Then, as was bound to happen, came the breaking point. She suddenly wrote to Emily saying that she had taken her determination and was coming home, assigning no cause. M. Héger, we gather, was vexed at her going, for subsequently she wrote to Ellen: ‘I suffered much before I left Brussels. I think, however long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with M. Héger cost me; it grieved me so much to grieve him, who has been so true, kind and disinterested a friend.’ It was a tradition in the Héger family that on parting with Mme. Héger she said ‘Je me vengerai’; but that is the kind of legend that may have arisen after the publication of Villette.

  She arrived at Haworth on January 2, 1844.

  CHAPTER IX

  Branwell and Anne were home for the Christmas holidays, but presently went back to their situations as tutor and governess to Mr. Robinson’s children at Thorp Green. Mrs. Gaskell says that ‘agonizing suspicions’ about Branwell’s conduct there had been one of the causes why Charlotte returned from Brussels, but it seems impossible that this was the case, for Charlotte wrote to Ellen, after she got back to Haworth, to say ‘that Branwell and Anne were both wondrously valued in their situations.’ Though she had longed to get away from the daily renewal of the secret strain and struggle of her life at Brussels, she found the quiet of home, with her father and Emily as companions, unutterably flat and objectless. ‘Something in me,’ she wrote, ‘which used to be enthusiasm is toned down and broken. I have fewer illusions: what I wish for now is active exertion.’

  She took up again the scheme for starting a school with her sisters. Thanks to Miss Branwell’s legacies there was now money enough. Emily’s six months at Brussels and her own year and three-quarters there had greatly added to their qualifications, and M. Héger at parting had given her a diploma certifying to her abilities as a teacher, and attached to it was the seal of the Athénée Royal at Brussels where he was professor in Latin. But once more the scheme must be changed, for Mr. Brontë was growing old; he was threatened with the loss of his sight, also he was disposed to drink too much, and it was no longer feasible that they should all leave him. Miss Wooler’s proposal had been possible while Miss Branwell was still alive, but not now. So with her indomitable courage Charlotte settled to turn the Parsonage into a school.

  Before May she was seeking for pupils, and fixed the terms at £25 per annum for board and English education, subsequently raising them to £35. She made some personal applications, but these led to nothing. Mr. White, to whose children she had been governess, regretted that his daughter was settled elsewhere; Colonel Stott and Mr. Bousfeild were in the same predicament. As soon as she could get the promise of only one pupil, she proposed to issue a circular and begin making the necessary alterations in the Parsonage.

  About this time she had, as she wrote to M. Héger, an offer of the post of head teacher in a girls’ school at Manchester at the salary of £100 a year; she refused that because she had high hopes of this school at Haworth, where she hoped to take five or six boarders. In July, though she had not secured any pupils, she printed her circular and sent it round ‘to all the friends on whom I have the slightest claim, and to some on whom I have no claim.’ She was sure she would succeed, for she wrote to Ellen, saying: ‘What an excellent thing perseverance is for getting on in the world. Calm self-confidence (not impudence, for that is vulgar and repulsive) is an admirable quality.’

  The circular ran as follows:

  THE MISSES BRONTËS’ ESTABLISHMENT

  FOR

  THE BOARD & EDUCATION

  OF A LIMITED NUMBER OF

  YOUNG LADIES.

  The Parsonage, Haworth,

  NEAR BRADFORD.

  Terms.

  £

  s.

  d.

  Board & education, including Writing, Arithmetic, History, Grammar, Geography, and Needle Work per annum:

  35

  0

  0

  French, German, Latin (Each per Quarter)

  1

  1

  0

  Music, Drawing, each per Quarter

  1

  1

  0

  Use of Piano Forte, per Quarter

  0

  5

  0

  Washing, per Quarter

  0

  15

  0

  Each young lady to be provided with One Pair of Sheets, Pillow Cases, Four Towels, a Dessert and Tea Spoon.

  A Quarter’s notice, or a Quarter’s Board, is required previous to the Removal of a Pupil.

  Out went these circulars broadcast; Ellen had half a dozen for distribution, but never an answer, beyond sympathy and regrets, came to any single one of them. The months went on, and in October Charlotte wrote to her friend saying, ‘Everyone wishes us well, but there are no pupils to be had.’ She had done everything that careful thought and iron determination could accomplish. She had qualified herself and Emily by pupilage and teaching at Brussels, there was sufficient money, Mr. Brontë had consented to the scheme, and all was ready except the pupils, whom no effort of will or circularisation would produce.

  Whether her sisters had still any enthusiasm for the idea is doubtful. Emily, in the private paper written on her birthday of 1845 for the secret eyes of Anne, exhibits none, making the following entry with regard to it:

  I should have mentioned that last summer (1844) the school scheme was revived in full vigour. We had prospectuses printed, despatched letters to all acquaintances, imparting our plans and did our little all: but it was found no go. Now I don’t desire a school at all, and none of us have any great longing for it.

  Anne, in her corresponding paper, was equally lukewarm. She says:

  When the last paper (1841) was written we were thinking of setting up a school. The scheme has been dropt, and long after taken up again, and dropt again, because we could not get pupils.

  From the first the initiative and driving-power had been wholly Charlotte’s, but now, in the autumn of 1844, she gave it up, because in spite of all her efforts no pupils would come. The abandonment of the school has, of course, been laid at Branwell’s door, and one notable Brontë biographer asks: ‘How could she (Charlotte) receive children at Haworth with this drugged and drunken wastrel in the house?’ But at the time when it was finally abandoned Branwell was still in his situation at Thorp Green, and was at home only for his holidays. We hear no more about the school, for the sake of which she and her sisters had taken abhorred situations as governesses, and for which Emily had suffered a half-year’s misery at Brussels. Anne was still ‘in the house of bondage’ at Thorp Green, where she remained till the summer of 1845.

  Charlotte’s disappointment was bitter, but she drew, on behalf of herself and her sisters, a moral lesson from it. ‘They were not mortified at defeat. The effort must be beneficial, whatever the result may be, because it teaches us experience and an additional knowledge of the world.’ Now in spite of her efforts without ruth to herself or them, the long-cherished idea for which she had worked for years had failed, and she recognised that it was hopeless. Never again did she attempt to revive it, or indeed allude to it.

  Throughout this year, while the withered leaves of her ambition for herself and her sisters dropped from the tree, she had to bear, in addition to this disappointment, a disqui
etude of which she could speak to none. She had fallen in love with M. Héger, and she was writing to him in terms that wring the heart of those who can now read what she said in a few of these desolate and longing letters. Sometimes he replied to them, but usually she got no answer. The first of these letters that is extant was dated July 24, 1844, at the time when she was sending out her circulars for the school, but there had been others before, as these extracts from it show.

  I am well aware that it is not my turn to write to you.... I once wrote you a letter that was less than reasonable because sorrow was at my heart: but I shall do so no more. I shall try to be selfish no longer, and even while I look upon your letters as one of the greatest felicities known to me, I shall wait the receipt of them in patience.

  I am firmly convinced that I shall see you again some day. I know not how or when — but it must be for I wish it so much....

  I should not know this lethargy if I could write. Formerly I spent whole days and weeks and months in writing, not wholly without result, for Southey and Coleridge, two of our best authors, to whom I sent certain MSS., were good enough to express their approval. Were I to write much I should become blind.... Otherwise I should write a book and dedicate it to my literature master.... The career of letters is closed to me, — only that of teaching is open....

  Once more good-bye, Monsieur — it hurts to say good-bye even in a letter. Oh, it is certain I shall see you again some day: it must be so, for as soon as I have earned money enough to go to Brussels I shall go there — and I shall see you again if only for a moment!

  There are one or two curious points about this letter. Charlotte was very short-sighted, but never did she have nor was even threatened with such trouble with her eyes as would prevent her from writing, and we must put this wail that the career of literature was closed to her ad misericordiam. Again, Southey had never expressed approval of the poems she sent him; indeed, his reply was such that Charlotte resolved to give up writing altogether. Wordsworth had been equally discouraging about the opening chapters of the novel she sent him, and it was Branwell not she who wrote to Hartley Coleridge for his verdict.

  There was no answer returned to this letter; the next is dated three months later, October 24, 1844. She now took advantage of Mary Taylor’s brother going to Brussels, and entrusted him to deliver it. In it she wrote: ‘I would only ask of you if you heard from me at the beginning of May and again in the month of August,’ Possibly she suspected that Madame had intercepted these two other letters. Yet still M. Héger gave no response, and once more she wrote to him on January 8, 1845:

  Mr. Taylor has returned. I asked him if he had a letter for me. ‘No, nothing.’ ‘Patience,’ said I, ‘his sister will be here soon.’ Miss Taylor has returned. ‘I have nothing for you from M. Héger,’ says she, ‘neither letter nor message.’

  Day and night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I am disturbed by tormenting dreams in which I see you always stern, always grim and vexed with me.... You will tell me perhaps: ‘I take not the slightest interest in you, Mdlle Charlotte. You are no longer an inmate of my house. I have forgotten you.’

  Well, Monsieur, tell me so frankly. It will be a shock to me. It matters not. It would be less dreadful than uncertainty.

  The fourth letter that survives is dated ‘Nov. 18,’ without indication of the year. But doubtless the year was 1845, not 1844, for in this letter she says that her father’s blindness has so increased that he can neither read nor write, and that in a few months’ time he will have an operation on his eyes. This operation took place in the summer of 1846. She writes:

  I have tried to forget you, for the remembrance of a person whom one thinks never to see again is too wearing to the spirit, and when one has suffered that kind of anxiety for a year or two one is ready to do anything to find peace once more.

  It is humiliating to be the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which lords it over the mind!

  For you to write will not be very interesting but for me it is life. Your last letter was stay and prop to me for half a year. When day by day I await a letter and when day by day disappointment comes to fling me back into overwhelming sorrow, and the sweet delight of seeing your handwriting and reading your counsel eludes me like a phantom vision, the fever takes me — I lose appetite and sleep and pine away.

  These letters evoke our unstinted compassion and sympathy with the writer. She had fallen in love with this man many years her senior, who was a Catholic, who had a wife and five children, and who had no interest in her save as a queer though clever pupil, and no feeling for her, as far as any evidence goes, except the affection presque paternelle, of which he had assured her father. They explain without need of any further comment the nature of the ‘irresistible impulse’ which took her back for the second time to Brussels against the warnings of her own conscience and common sense; they define the ‘selfish folly’ for which, as she wrote to Ellen, she was ‘punished by a withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.’ She knew the insanity of what she was doing, but she compounded with her accusing conscience, telling herself, perhaps more than half convincing herself, that she was going back to Brussels not for that reason at all, but in order to fit herself better, by a completer knowledge of French and German, for the school which she was determined to start with her sisters. Then there was M. Héger’s letter to her father: he had strongly urged her to return, and by another year’s work fulfil the remarkable progress she had already made; surely it would be unwise to disregard the advice of one so experienced. Such considerations were weighty; it would be missing a chance of future success not to act as she had done. But all the time her conscience told her not to go. She had gone, and at once the harvest which she had herself sown began to ripen. Her affection for him grew into a devotion and a surrender so abject, that when finally, after long procrastinations, she returned home she could not refrain from writing to him these love-letters, though all the time she knew that Madame had long suspected her feelings for him, and for months had spied on her. That gives the measure of her passion, and she risked anything sooner than not have the bitter consolation of writing to him and the eager suspense of waiting month by month for his rare replies. Once, knowing nothing of what she was talking about, she had been profuse in exhortations to Ellen, laying down with precision the manner in which a girl should prudently and without undue haste allow herself to fall in love with a man who wanted her, bidding her remember the importance of her keeping herself well in hand, and warning her of the monstrous folly of a grande passion. Now she had committed that monstrous folly in the most undesirable manner; she had fallen hopelessly in love with a man who felt nothing for her, and who could not possibly marry her. Bitter was wisdom.

  Then we must look at the affair from the point of view of M. Héger and his wife. It was known to both of them, while Charlotte was still at Brussels, that she had formed this strong attachment to him, for from that arose Monsieur’s coldness and Madame’s spyings, and when these letters began to arrive it was necessary to act with circumspection. A girl who wrote in such a strain to the respectable father of a family might do something more embarrassing yet; indeed, she had threatened in one of them to visit Brussels again and see him. M. Héger behaved very properly. He did not always answer Charlotte’s letters, but, when he did, he employed his wife as his amanuensis; this was no rare thing, for he much disliked writing himself. It was wise and prudent that she should know how he replied, and his answers, written by her, had thus passed the conjugal censorship. What these replies were is unknown, for either Charlotte destroyed them or her husband did so after her death, but we shall find reasons for feeling sure that they were careful and circumspect. M. Héger did not read to his wife Charlotte’s letters to him, but tore them up and threw the pieces into the waste-paper basket. One he did not destroy, for he had noted on the back of it the address of a Brussels bootmaker. Then, we assume, he imagined he had lost it, and thought no more of it. That was M
. Héger’s share in the matter; Madame had a policy of her own, which was disclosed many years later.

  Such was the superficial history of this correspondence, and there, as far as M. Héger was aware, the matter stayed till after Charlotte’s death. But the inner and subsequent history of these four letters of Charlotte’s which survived and which are now in the British Museum is so interesting and extraordinary that, though the story of them lies outside the immediate sphere of the affairs of the Brontës, it must be followed up, as revealed by Mr. Marion H. Spielmann, who obtained it from M. Héger’s daughter, Mdlle. Louise Héger. An old lady of over seventy years of age when these letters were published in 1913, she was a girl of six when Charlotte left her mother’s pensionnat. She remembered her quite well, ‘a little person, extremely narrow of chest, with side-curls, large eyes (but not so large as in her portrait) and sadly defective teeth — somewhat ill-favoured indeed, and unattractive to look upon — and yet beloved by her.’ The following is the account that Mdlle. Héger gave to Mr. Spielmann.